Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday November 10, 2013 @08:36PM
from the walk-like-a-man dept.

MarkWhittington writes "Project M was a proposal at NASA's Johnson Spaceflight Center that would have put together a mission to deliver a bipedal robot to the lunar surface within a thousand days. The idea never got out of the conception stage, but two major components, a new type of lunar lander, now called Morpheus, and a robonaut continued on as separate projects. Morpheus is getting ready to conduct a second attempt at free flight tests at the Kennedy Space Center. The first attempt resulted in the destruction of the prototype vehicle. If the second round of tests is successful, NASA will have a spacecraft that could deliver 1,100 pounds of payload to the lunar surface. While a copy of Robonaut 2 is still undergoing tests on board the International Space Station, ABC News reports that a cousin of the mechanical person has been built with legs. It stands eight feet tall and weighs 500 pounds. With two major components of Project M nearing completion, could a robonaut become the next moon walker?"

Wheels would be a lot better.
Once the rover was made available, our moonwalkers hopped in it and took off exploring. No legs just eliminates the middle man.
Before we know it, we'll have software developers fused to our chairs and fed through tubes as to increase efficiency.

If there is a reason to not use wheels (I haven't heard any), then surely 4 legs or maybe 6 make more sense than two.The load carrying capability is greater, the ballance issue is easier to handle and fall recovery less of an issue.

So wheels with controlled Hydraulic suspension, to lift the wheel up more.

The reason why we living things don't have wheels isn't because legs are so much better, but it will take extraordinary effort for evolution to make wheels. as normally it would mean the wheel will need to be cut off from the rest of the body. So either the wheel and the body will need to be two different life forms, needing their own food and energy. Or the wheels will need to be made from dead tissue, which would mean after they w

Um... No. The reason wheels didn't catch on evolutionary wise is that wheels don't work well in water. They also don't work well on the bulk of dry terrain either, but that's beside the point. The wheel/limb decision point was in life's deep past (or, life's past in the deep), probably back when life was first becoming multicellular. The flagellum (which is a wheel) was ditched in favour of waving fins. The fins, as the lungfish crawled through the tidal basins evolved into limbs.

Legs are useless in space, unless they can grab like a monkey's. 3 arms would be great as would multiple legs once on the moon, however I suspect that the reason for the 2 arms, 2 legs is so it can intuitively be controlled remotely by a single human.

Yes. The tech and space race during the cold war drove huge demand for technical and specialized labor, as well as immense demand for the resources and know-how to educate such a workforce (an increasingly educated workforce generally means a more productive one). Even if there isn't an immediate product being produced, you're still drawing more people into higher paying jobs, and giving them experience that will benefit them for their careers well after a given project is done. The economical benefits of even pie-in-the-sky research are positive and long lasting.

And before somebody says anything, no this is not a broken window fallacy. A BWF would be to say the money put into building the rockets is value added. This is a different argument.

NASA's budget represents about 0.5% of the U.S. national budget. I think we can probably find _something_ to cut (say, maybe getting in a few less wars). Or maybe we could raise taxes on the 400 Americans who control more wealth than 150 million other Americans?

>Military has alread been drastically cut in the last year.
Yes. And it's still more bloated and larger than the next 10 or so largest military budgets in the world. It needs cut further. Let's cut the f-35,

It should at least be reevaluated by an independent group. Many countries have already dumped several tons of money into it. If it can be completed for considerably less than has already been put into it, then it needs to be finished. If there's no chance in hell of that, then it does need to be cut.

the f-22,

Are you a fucking idiot? It's already been tested and used in theater. You don't cut something that's already in service unless it's obsolete, or has sub-par performance. You can argue for drones all you like, b

There are a few fluke people that starve to death every year because they are stranded in the wilderness, or locked in a room, or an elderly person that breaks a hip and can't get up or call for help. Anorexic women also occasionally starve themselves to death. But the number of Americans that starve because of economic conditions is zero. The poorest region in America is the Mississippi Delta [wikipedia.org], which has one of the highest obesity rates in the world.

The UK has a space hardware manufacturing industry. We make a lot of scientific and commercial sats. We just have no launch facilities, because physics says those need to be as close to equatorial as possible. We're too far north.

Yes a nation can work on more then one initiative at a time.Space Travel inspires people to be Engineers, Scientists, to take risks and look further. That means the kids have a reason to get more schooling and get a better education. Now this educated population will be better at surviving in a global economy, even if they don't get into aerospace.

We have programs available for people to get food if they need it and not starve. A lot of those who are starving do not take advantage of these programs, or do

The first attempt resulted in the destruction of the prototype vehicle. If the second round of tests is successful,

It's times like these I wonder if the html BLINK tag was retired too early. Because that's a very, very big 'if', so big in fact that the atrocity that was BLINK might be justified. But not marquee, because screw you Microsoft. Sinner!

That "if" is big enough to justify blink, marquee and strong tags. It's like if I tell you that I'm going to audition for a movie next week. Last time I practiced I accidentally set my hair on fire, but if I do well next week I'll be a big star.

When the Martian rovers do so well on wheels? The wheel works, the leg is fiddly and invert-pendulumy. We have enough issues getting shit put into orbit and sent off to Mars/Moon/Alpha-Centauri, why are we dicking around with legs?

When the Martian rovers do so well on wheels? The wheel works, the leg is fiddly and invert-pendulumy. We have enough issues getting shit put into orbit and sent off to Mars/Moon/Alpha-Centauri, why are we dicking around with legs?

Well, Neil Amstrong took only a small step.Meanwhile, police alleged that giant steps is what you take walking on the moon; someone need to prove the allegation.

I wonder how they test this robot's ability to walk, considering that the moon's gravity is 16.6% of Earth's. Or are they taking that into consideration in the programing (and will simply adjust the code later, when on the moon)? Seems cool that gravity would be an item, coded into the robot's functions.

Don't know about this particular one, but I've seen fractional G modeled by putting the test subject under water or suspending the excess weight from wires. Both those options would mess with testing stability though.

Let's say that you were an alien geologist dropped onto Earth. You get a couple of weeks to explore, with almost no equipment more complex than a rock hammer, an area smaller than Central Park in New York and bring back a total of a couple hundred kilos of samples for analysis. That's what we managed with Apollo.